About

Open Audiobooks narrates books that are in the United States public domain and releases the results as free M4B audiobooks. There is no account, no paywall, and no tracking.

How a recording is made

The text comes from a Standard Ebooks edition. Standard Ebooks takes public domain transcriptions, corrects them against scans, and applies consistent typography. Their cover art is used for the audiobook.

The EPUB’s spine and table of contents set the chapter breaks. The text is split at paragraph and sentence boundaries and narrated through Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS model, each passage receiving the tail of the preceding one as silent context so that emphasis and character delivery carry across the seams. The result is encoded as AAC, with the chapter table and cover art written into the container.

Structural pages, page numbers, and footnotes are left out of the narration.

What you get

One M4B file per book. M4B is an MP4 container holding AAC audio plus a chapter table, which is what audiobook players expect. It opens in Apple Books, Audiobookshelf, VLC, Voice, BookPlayer, and most podcast apps.

Audio is 64 kbps mono at 24 kHz. That is a deliberate trade: speech at this rate is clear, and a full-length novel stays small enough to download over a phone connection. Every download on this site states its exact length and file size before you start it.

Files are served from a CDN at stable URLs. A published recording is never overwritten in place, so a link that works today keeps working and keeps pointing at the same audio.

Limits worth knowing

The narrator is a generative model, not a person. It can mispronounce proper nouns, misread an abbreviation, or shift its delivery between passages. Recordings are checked before release, but errors get through.

Standard Ebooks describes its texts and cover art as public domain in the United States. Copyright terms differ by country. Confirm that a given book is public domain where you are before redistributing it.

License

The audio is released under CC0. Copy it, host it, remix it, sell it. No attribution required.